Kevin Rudd would rather fly into Brisbane or Melbourne than Sydney Airport

KEVIN Rudd has delivered a scathing report card on Sydney Airport, confessing he would rather fly into Melbourne or Brisbane.

The frequent-flyer MP told a crowd of tourism industry leaders in Canberra this week that Customs queues for international flights at Sydney Airport were simply too long.

"I would rather land in Melbourne or Brisbane any day," Mr Rudd said. "For different reasons.

"It's just that at Melbourne, they manage to put the international and domestic terminal in one building. I think that's pretty smart.

"Brisbane they didn't get that far but it's pretty close."

Speaking at a Tourism and Transport Forum, Mr Rudd said the fault was not with staff but the protocols and design of Sydney Airport.

"Sydney, I came in the other morning from the UK giving some lectures on China," he said. "And I was talking to those guys in Customs as we just looked at the queues in the two arrival halls.

"I said, 'OK guys what's it like?' And this bloke said to me, 'We are the only airport in the world that manages to think you can suddenly funnel four lines into one. Obviously there's a greater wisdom, but it doesn't work, mate'. Frankly, we can do better. People do not like that level of queuing."

But Mr Rudd said that his least favourite airport in the world was in Los Angeles: "Bad equals LAX."

Reflecting on the opportunities ahead in Australia for Chinese tourism as China's middle class grows more affluent, Mr Rudd said Australia needed to prepare for a new and very different market.

"To really hop inside the minds of Chinese tourists for the next 20 years and what they want and where they want to go and how they want to go. How long they want to go. This will be huge," he said.

"Secondly, understanding that Chinese tourists when they come here are like Japanese tourists in the 1970s.

"It is wrapping our mind around that and multiplying it by 10 and getting ready."

Mr Rudd, the former foreign minister, said that learning Asian languages was an important way to show respect in the region.

"They find it cute I can speak Chinese. But at a much deeper level they see it as a sign of respect that you have made the effort to understand how an entirely different culture thinks," he said.

Mr Rudd also told a well-worn vignette about the day he lost his shoes on an official overseas visit and was forced to borrow his adviser's shoes.

"I mean these shoes were kind of out there, Elvis 60s. I put these shoes on and I just felt like a mug lair. I thought recently about Julia's experience in India. I had something almost like that as well."

He also joked about government controlled media.

"As Harry Truman once said, if you want an efficient government, then get yourself a dictatorship," he said.